A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) (z-lib.org)

“Andy,” he says, wanting to cry himself. “I swear to you I’m not doing
anything else to myself. Just the cutting.”

“Just the cutting!” Andy repeats, and makes a strange squawk of laughter.
“Well, I suppose—given the context—I have to be grateful for that. ‘Just the
cutting.’ You know how messed up that is, right, that that should be such a
relief to me?”

“I know,” he says.

Tuesday turns to Wednesday, and then to Thursday; his face feels worse,
and then better, and then worse again. He had worried that Caleb might call
him or, worse, materialize at his apartment, but the days pass and he doesn’t:
maybe he has stayed out in Bridgehampton. Maybe he has gotten run over by
a car. He finds, oddly, that he feels nothing—not fear, not hate, not anything.
The worst has happened, and now he is free. He has had a relationship, and it
was awful, and now he will never need to have one again, because he has
proven himself incapable of being in one. His time with Caleb has confirmed
everything he feared people would think of him, of his body, and his next task
is to learn to accept that, and to do so without sorrow. He knows he will still
probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that
loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to
whatever it was—terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement,
yearning, loathing—he felt with Caleb.

That Friday he sees Harold, who is in town for a conference at Columbia.
He had already written Harold to warn him of his injury, but it doesn’t stop
Harold from overreacting, exclaiming and fussing over him and asking him
dozens of times if he is actually all right.

They have met at one of Harold’s favorite restaurants, where the beef
comes from cows that the chef has named and raised himself on a farm
upstate, and the vegetables are grown on the roof of the building, and they are
talking and eating their entrées—he is careful to only chew on the right side
of his mouth, and to avoid letting any food come in contact with his new tooth
—when he senses someone standing near their table, and when he looks up, it
is Caleb, and although he had convinced himself he feels nothing, he is
immediately, overwhelmingly terrified.

He had never seen Caleb drunk in their time together, but he can tell
instantly that he is, and in a dangerous mood. “Your secretary told me where
you were,” Caleb says to him. “You must be Harold,” he says, and extends his
hand to Harold, who shakes it, looking bewildered.

“Jude?” Harold asks him, but he can’t speak.

“Caleb Porter,” says Caleb, and slides into the semicircular booth, pressing
against his side. “Your son and I are dating.”

Harold looks at Caleb, and then at him, and opens his mouth, speechless for
the first time since he has known him.

“Let me ask you something,” Caleb says to Harold, leaning in as if
delivering a confidence, and he stares at Caleb’s face, his vulpine
handsomeness, his dark, glinting eyes. “Be honest. Don’t you ever wish you
had a normal son, not a cripple?”

For a moment, no one says anything, and he can feel something, a current,
sizzle in the air. “Who the fuck are you?” hisses Harold, and then he watches
Harold’s face change, his features contorting so quickly and violently from
shock to disgust to anger that he looks, for an instant, inhuman, a ghoul in
Harold’s clothing. And then his expression changes again, and he watches
something harden in Harold’s face, as if his very muscles are ossifying before
him.

“You did this to him,” he says to Caleb, very slowly. And then to him, in
dismay, “It wasn’t tennis, was it, Jude. This man did this to you.”

“Harold, don’t,” he begins to say, but Caleb has grabbed his wrist, and is
gripping it so hard that he feels it might be breaking. “You little liar,” he says
to him. “You’re a cripple and a liar and a bad fuck. And you’re right—you’re
disgusting. I couldn’t even look at you, not ever.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” says Harold, biting down on each word. They
are all of them speaking in whispers, but the conversation feels so loud, and
the rest of the restaurant so silent, that he is certain everyone can hear them.

“Harold, don’t,” he begs him. “Stop, please.”

But Harold doesn’t listen to him. “I’m going to call the police,” he says,
and Caleb slides out of the booth and stands, and Harold stands as well. “Get
out of here right now,” Harold repeats, and now everyone really is looking in
their direction, and he is so mortified that he feels sick.

“Harold,” he pleads.

He can tell from Caleb’s swaying motion that he is really very drunk, and
when he pushes at Harold’s shoulder, Harold is about to push back when he
finds his voice, finally, and shouts Harold’s name, and Harold turns to him
and lowers his arm. Caleb gives him his small smile, then, and turns and
leaves, shoving past some of the waiters who have silently gathered around
him.

Harold stands there for a moment, staring at the door, and then begins to

follow Caleb, and he calls Harold’s name again, desperate, and Harold comes
back to him.

“Jude—” Harold begins, but he shakes his head. He is so angry, so furious,
that his humiliation has almost been eclipsed by his rage. Around them, he
can hear people’s conversations resuming. He hails their waiter and gives him
his credit card, which is returned to him in what feels like seconds. He doesn’t
have his wheelchair today, for which he is enormously, bitterly grateful, and
in those moments he is leaving the restaurant, he feels he has never been so
nimble, has never moved so quickly or decisively.

Outside, it is pouring. His car is parked a block away, and he shuffles down
the sidewalk, Harold silent at his side. He is so livid he wishes he could not
give Harold a ride at all, but they are on the east side, near Avenue A, and
Harold will never be able to find a cab in the rain.

“Jude—” Harold says once they’re in the car, but he interrupts him,
keeping his eyes on the road before him. “I was begging you not to say
anything, Harold,” he says. “And you did anyway. Why did you do that,
Harold? You think my life is a joke? You think my problems are just an
opportunity for you to grandstand?” He doesn’t even know what he means,
doesn’t know what he’s trying to say.

“No, Jude, of course not,” says Harold, his voice gentle. “I’m sorry—I just
lost it.”

This sobers him for some reason, and for a few blocks they are silent,
listening to the sluice of the wipers.

“Were you really going out with him?” Harold asks.

He gives a single, terse nod. “But not anymore?” Harold asks, and he
shakes his head. “Good,” Harold mutters. And then, very softly, “Did he hit
you?”

He has to wait and control himself before he can answer. “Only a few
times,” he says.

“Oh, Jude,” says Harold, in a voice he has never heard Harold use before.

“Let me ask you something, though,” Harold says, as they edge down
Fifteenth Street, past Sixth Avenue. “Jude—why were you going out with
someone who would treat you like that?”

He doesn’t answer for another block, trying to think of what he could say,
how he could articulate his reasons in a way Harold would understand. “I was
lonely,” he says, finally.

“Jude,” Harold says, and stops. “I understand that,” he says. “But why

him?”

“Harold,” he says, and he hears how awful, how wretched, he sounds,
“when you look like I do, you have to take what you can get.”

They are quiet again, and then Harold says, “Stop the car.”

“What?” he says. “I can’t. There are people behind me.”

“Stop the damn car, Jude,” Harold repeats, and when he doesn’t, Harold
reaches over and grabs the wheel and pulls it sharply to the right, into an
empty space in front of a fire hydrant. The car behind passes them, its horn
bleating a long, warning note.

“Jesus, Harold!” he yells. “What the hell are you trying to do? You nearly
got us into an accident!”

“Listen to me, Jude,” says Harold slowly, and reaches for him, but he pulls
himself back against the window, away from Harold’s hands. “You are the
most beautiful person I have ever met—ever.”

“Harold,” he says, “stop, stop. Please stop.”

“Look at me, Jude,” says Harold, but he can’t. “You are. It breaks my heart
that you can’t see this.”

“Harold,” he says, and he is almost moaning, “please, please. If you care
about me, you’ll stop.”

“Jude,” says Harold, and reaches for him again, but he flinches, and brings
his hands up to protect himself. Out of the edge of his eye, he can see Harold
lower his hand, slowly.

He finally puts his hands back on the steering wheel, but they are shaking
too badly for him to start the ignition, and he tucks them under his thighs,
waiting. “Oh god,” he hears himself repeating, “oh god.”

“Jude,” Harold says again.

“Leave me alone, Harold,” he says, and now his teeth are chattering as
well, and it is difficult for him to speak. “Please.”

They sit there in silence for minutes. He concentrates on the sound of the
rain, the traffic light turning red and green and orange, and the count of his
breaths. Finally his shaking stops, and he starts the car and drives west, and
north, up to Harold’s building.

“Come stay in the apartment tonight,” Harold says, turning to him, but he
shakes his head, staring straight ahead. “At least come up and have a cup of
tea and wait until you feel a little better,” but he shakes his head again.

“Jude,” Harold says, “I’m really sorry—for everything, for all of it.” He nods,
but still can’t say anything. “Will you call me if you need anything?” Harold
persists, and he nods again. And then Harold reaches his hand up, slowly, as if
he is a feral animal, and strokes the back of his head, twice, before getting
out, closing the door softly behind him.

He takes the West Side Highway home. He is so sore, so depleted: but now
his humiliations are complete. He has been punished enough, he thinks, even
for him. He will go home, and cut himself, and then he will begin forgetting:
this night in particular, but also the past four months.

At Greene Street he parks in the garage and rides the elevator up past the
silent floors, clinging to the cage-door mesh; he is so tired that he will slump
to the ground if he doesn’t. Richard is away for the fall at a residency in
Rome, and the building is sepulchral around him.

He steps into his darkened apartment and is feeling for the light switch
when something clots him, hard, on the swollen side of his face, and even in
the dark he can see his new tooth project itself into the air.

It is Caleb, of course, and he can hear and smell his breath even before
Caleb flicks the master switch and the apartment is illuminated, dazzlingly,
into something brighter than day, and he looks up and sees Caleb above him,
peering down at him. Even drunk, he is composed, and now some of his
drunkenness has been clarified by rage, and his gaze is steady and focused.
He feels Caleb grab him by his hair, feels him hit him on the right side of his
face, the good one, feels his head snapping backward in response.

Caleb still hasn’t said anything, and now he drags him to the sofa, the only
sounds Caleb’s steady breaths and his frantic gulps. He pushes his face into
the cushions and holds his head down with one hand, while with the other, he
begins pulling off his clothes. He begins to panic, then, and struggle, but
Caleb presses one arm against the back of his neck, which paralyzes him, and
he is unable to move; he can feel himself become exposed to the air piece by
piece—his back, his arms, the backs of his legs—and when everything’s been
removed, Caleb yanks him to his feet again and pushes him away, but he falls,
and lands on his back.

“Get up,” says Caleb. “Right now.”

He does; his nose is discharging something, blood or mucus, that is making
it difficult for him to breathe. He stands; he has never felt more naked, more
exposed in his life. When he was a child, and things were happening to him,
he used to be able to leave his body, to go somewhere else. He would pretend
he was something inanimate—a curtain rod, a ceiling fan—a dispassionate,
unfeeling witness to the scene occurring beneath him. He would watch

himself and feel nothing: not pity, not anger, nothing. But now, although he
tries, he finds he cannot remove himself. He is in this apartment, his
apartment, standing before a man who detests him, and he knows this is the
beginning, not the end, of a long night, one he has no choice but to wait
through and endure. He will not be able to control this night, he will not be
able to stop it.

“My god,” Caleb says, after looking at him for a few long moments; it is
the first time he has ever seen him wholly naked. “My god, you really are
deformed. You really are.”

For some reason, it is this, this pronouncement, that brings them both back
to themselves, and he finds himself, for the first time in decades, crying.
“Please,” he says. “Please, Caleb, I’m sorry.” But Caleb has already grabbed
him by the back of his neck and is hurrying him, half dragging him, toward
the front door. Into the elevator they go, and down the flights, and then he is
being dragged out of the elevator and marched down the hallway toward the
lobby. By now he is hysterical, pleading with Caleb, asking him again and
again what he’s doing, what he’s going to do to him. At the front door, Caleb
lifts him, and for a moment his face is fitted into the tiny dirty glass window
that looks out onto Greene Street, and then Caleb is opening the door and he
is being pushed out, naked, into the street.

“No!” he shouts, half inside, half outside. “Caleb, please!” He is pulled
between a crazed hope and a desperate fear that someone will walk by. But it
is raining too hard; no one will walk by. The rain drums a wild pattern on his
face.

“Beg me,” says Caleb, raising his voice over the rain, and he does, pleading
with him. “Beg me to stay,” Caleb demands. “Apologize to me,” and he does,
again and again, his mouth filling with his own blood, his own tears.

Finally he is brought inside, and is dragged back to the elevator, where
Caleb says things to him, and he apologizes and apologizes, repeating Caleb’s
words back to him as he instructs: I’m repulsive. I’m disgusting. I’m
worthless. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

In the apartment, Caleb lets go of his neck, and he falls, his legs unsteady
beneath him, and Caleb kicks him in the stomach so hard that he vomits, and
then again in his back, and he slides over Malcolm’s lovely, clean floors and
into the vomit. His beautiful apartment, he thinks, where he has always been
safe. This is happening to him in his beautiful apartment, surrounded by his
beautiful things, things that have been given to him in friendship, things that
he has bought with money he has earned. His beautiful apartment, with its
doors that lock, where he was meant to be protected from broken elevators

and the degradation of pulling himself upstairs on his arms, where he was
meant to always feel human and whole.

Then he is being lifted again, and moved, but it is difficult to see where
he’s being taken: one eye is already swollen shut, and the other is blurry. His
vision keeps blinking in and out.

But then he realizes that Caleb is taking him to the door that leads to the
emergency stairs. It is the one element of the old loft that Malcolm kept: both
because he had to and because he liked how bluntly utilitarian it was, how
unapologetically ugly. Now Caleb unslides the bolt, and he finds himself
standing at the top of the dark, steep staircase. “So descent-into-hell looking,”
he remembers Richard saying. One side of him is gluey with vomit; he can
feel other liquids—he cannot think about what they are—moving down other
parts of him: his face, his neck, his thighs.

He is whimpering from pain and fear, clutching the edge of the doorframe,
when he hears, rather than sees, Caleb move back and run at him, and then his
foot is kicking him in his back, and he is flying into the black of the staircase.

As he soars, he thinks, suddenly, of Dr. Kashen. Or not of Dr. Kashen,
necessarily, but the question he had asked him when he was applying to be his
advisee: What’s your favorite axiom? (The nerd pickup line, CM had once
called it.)

“The axiom of equality,” he’d said, and Kashen had nodded, approvingly.
“That’s a good one,” he’d said.

The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you
have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself,
that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so
irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to
itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is
impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much
as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the
axiom of equality—Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an
axiom—but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of
the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It
was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that
could easily become an entire life.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself—
his very life—has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am,
he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and
he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have
parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be

feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires
disgust, a person meant to be hated. And in that microsecond that he finds
himself suspended in the air, between the ecstasy of being aloft and the
anticipation of his landing, which he knows will be terrible, he knows that x
will always equal x, no matter what he does, or how many years he moves
away from the monastery, from Brother Luke, no matter how much he earns
or how hard he tries to forget. It is the last thing he thinks as his shoulder
cracks down upon the concrete, and the world, for an instant, jerks blessedly
away from beneath him: x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.

2

WHEN JACOB WAS very small, maybe six months old or so, Liesl came down
with pneumonia. Like most healthy people, she was a terrible sick person:
grouchy and petulant and, mostly, stunned by the unfamiliar place in which
she now found herself. “I don’t get sick,” she kept saying, as if some mistake
had been made, as if what had been given her had been meant for someone
else.

Because Jacob was a sickly baby—not in any dramatic way, but he had
already had two colds in his short life, and even before I knew what his smile
looked like, I knew what his cough sounded like: a surprisingly mature hack
—we decided that it would be better if Liesl spent the next few days at Sally’s
to rest and get better, and I stayed at home with Jacob.

I thought myself basically competent with my son, but over the course of
the weekend, I must have called my father twenty times to ask him about the
various little mysteries that kept presenting themselves, or to confirm with
him what I knew I knew but which, in my fluster, I had forgotten: He was
making strange noises that sounded like hiccups but were too irregular to
actually be hiccups—what were they? His stool was a little runny—was that a
sign of anything? He liked to sleep on his stomach, but Liesl said that he
should be on his back, and yet I had always heard that he’d be perfectly fine
on his stomach—would he be? Of course, I could’ve looked all of this up, but
I wanted definitive answers, and I wanted to hear them from my father, who
had not just the right answers but the right way of delivering them. It
comforted me to hear his voice. “Don’t worry,” he said at the end of every
call. “You’re doing just fine. You know how to do this.” He made me believe
I did.

After Jacob got sick, I called my father less: I couldn’t bear to talk to him.
The questions I now had for him—how would I get through this?; what would
I do, afterward?; how could I watch my child die?—were ones I couldn’t even
bring myself to ask, and ones I knew would make him cry to try to answer.

He had just turned four when we noticed that something was wrong. Every
morning, Liesl would take him to nursery school, and every afternoon, after
my last class, I would pick him up. He had a serious face, and so people
thought that he was a more somber kid than he really was: at home, though,
he ran around, up and down the staircase, and I ran after him, and when I was
lying on the couch reading, he would come flopping down on top of me. Liesl
too became playful around him, and sometimes the two of them would run
through the house, shrieking and squealing, and it was my favorite noise, my
favorite kind of clatter.

It was October when he began getting tired. I picked him up one day, and
all of the other children, all of his friends, were in a jumble, talking and
jumping, and then I looked for my son and saw him in a far corner of the
room, curled on his mat, sleeping. One of the teachers was sitting near him,
and when she saw me, she waved me over. “I think he might be coming down
with something,” she said. “He’s been a little listless for the past day or so,
and he was so tired after lunch that we just let him sleep.” We loved this
school: other schools made the kids try to read, or have lessons, but this
school, which was favored by the university’s professors, was what I thought
school should be for a four-year-old—all they seemed to do was listen to
people reading them books, and make various crafts, and go on field trips to
the zoo.

I had to carry him out to the car, but when we got home, he woke and was
fine, and ate the snack I made him, and listened to me read to him before we
built the day’s centerpiece together. For his birthday, Sally had gotten him a
set of beautiful wooden blocks that were carved into geode-like shapes and
could be stacked very high and into all sorts of interesting forms; every day
we built a new construction in the center of the table, and when Liesl got
home, Jacob would explain to her what we’d been building—a dinosaur, a
spaceman’s tower—and Liesl would take a picture of it.

That night I told Liesl what Jacob’s teacher had said, and the next day,
Liesl took him to the doctor, who said he seemed perfectly normal, that
nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Still, we watched him over the next few
days: Was he more energetic or less? Was he sleeping longer than usual,
eating less than usual? We didn’t know. But we were frightened: there is
nothing more terrifying than a listless child. The very word seems, now, a
euphemism for a terrible fate.

And then, suddenly, things began to accelerate. We went to my parents’
over Thanksgiving and were having dinner when Jacob began seizing. One
moment he was present, and the next he was rigid, his body becoming a
plank, sliding off the chair and beneath the table, his eyeballs rolling upward,
his throat making a strange, hollow clicking noise. It lasted only ten seconds
or so, but it was awful, so awful I can still hear that horrible clicking noise,
still see the horrible stillness of his head, his legs marching back and forth in
the air.

My father ran and called a friend of his at New York Presbyterian and we
rushed there, and Jacob was admitted, and the four of us stayed in his room
overnight—my father and Adele lying on their coats on the floor, Liesl and I
sitting on either side of the bed, unable to look at each other.

Once he had stabilized, we went home, where Liesl had called Jacob’s

pediatrician, another med-school classmate of hers, to make appointments
with the best neurologist, the best geneticist, the best immunologist—we
didn’t know what it was, but whatever it was, she wanted to make sure Jacob
had the best. And then began the months of going from one doctor to the next,
of having Jacob’s blood drawn and brain scanned and reflexes tested and eyes
peered into and hearing examined. The whole process was so invasive, so
frustrating—I had never known there were so many ways to say “I don’t
know” until I met these doctors—and at times I would think of how difficult,
how impossible it must be for parents who didn’t have the connections we
did, who didn’t have Liesl’s scientific literacy and knowledge. But that
literacy didn’t make it easier to see Jacob cry when he was pricked with
needles, so many times that one vein, the one in his left arm, began to
collapse, and all those connections didn’t prevent him from getting sicker and
sicker, from seizing more and more, and he would shake and froth, and emit a
growl, something primal and frightening and far too low-pitched for a four-
year-old, as his head knocked from side to side and his hands gnarled
themselves.

By the time we had our diagnosis—an extremely rare neurodegenerative
disease called Nishihara syndrome, one so rare that it wasn’t even included on
batteries of genetic tests—he was almost blind. That was February. By June,
when he turned five, he rarely spoke. By August, we didn’t think he could
hear any longer.

He seized more and more. We tried one drug after the next; we tried them
in combinations. Liesl had a friend who was a neurologist who told us about a
new drug that hadn’t been approved in the States yet but was available in
Canada; that Friday, Liesl and Sally drove up to Montreal and back, all in
twelve hours. For a while the drug worked, although it gave him a terrible
rash, and whenever we touched his skin he would open his mouth and scream,
although no sound came out, and tears would run out of his eyes. “I’m sorry,
buddy,” I would plead with him, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me,
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I could barely concentrate at work. I was only teaching part-time that year;
it was my second year at the university, my third semester. I would walk
through campus and overhear conversations—someone talking about splitting
up with her boyfriend, someone talking about a bad grade he got on a test,
someone talking about his sprained ankle—and would feel rage. You stupid,
petty, selfish, self-absorbed people, I wanted to say. You hateful people, I hate
you. Your problems aren’t problems. My son is dying. At times my loathing
was so profound I would get sick. Laurence was teaching at the university
then as well, and he would pick up my classes when I had to take Jacob to the

hospital. We had a home health-care worker, but we took him to every
appointment so we could keep track of how fast he was leaving us. In
September, his doctor looked at us after he had examined him. “Not long
now,” he said, and he was very gentle, and that was the worst part.

Laurence came over every Wednesday and Saturday night; Gillian came
every Tuesday and Thursday; Sally came every Monday and Sunday; another
friend of Liesl’s, Nathan, came every Friday. When they were there, they
would cook or clean, and Liesl and I would sit with Jacob and talk to him. He
had stopped growing sometime in the last year, and his arms and legs had
gone soft from lack of use: they were floppy, boneless even, and you had to
make sure that when you held him, you held his limbs close to you, or they
would simply dangle off of him and he would look dead. He had stopped
opening his eyes at all in early September, although sometimes they would
leak fluids: tears, or a clumpy, yellowish mucus. Only his face remained
plump, and that was because he was on such massive doses of steroids. One
drug or another had left him with an eczematic rash on his cheeks, candied-
red and sandpapery, that was always hot and rough to the touch.

My father and Adele moved in with us in mid-September, and I couldn’t
look at him. I knew he knew what it was like to see children dying; I knew
how much it hurt him that it was my child. I felt as if I had failed: I felt that I
was being punished for not wanting Jacob more passionately when he had
been given to us. I felt that if I had been less ambivalent about having
children, this never would have happened; I felt that I was being reminded of
how foolish and stupid I’d been to not recognize what a gift I’d been given, a
gift that so many people yearned for and yet I had been willing to send back. I
was ashamed—I would never be the father my father was, and I hated that he
was here witnessing my failings.

Before Jacob had been born, I had asked my father one night if he had any
words of wisdom for me. I had been joking, but he took it seriously, as he
took all questions I asked him. “Hmm,” he said. “Well, the hardest thing
about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you
will be.”

At the time, I had pretty much ignored this advice, but as Jacob got sicker
and sicker, I thought of it more and more frequently, and realized how correct
he was. We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but
we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We
as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren’t equipped for the
possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too
much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap—if we were all so specifically,
vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have

children at all.

When we first realized that Jacob was sick, that there was something wrong
with him, we both tried very hard to recalibrate, and quickly. We had never
said that we wanted him to go to college, for example; we simply assumed he
would, and to graduate school as well, because we both had. But that first
night we spent in the hospital, after his first seizure, Liesl, who was always a
planner, who had a brilliant ability to see five steps, ten steps, ahead, said,
“No matter what this is, he can still live a long and healthy life, you know.
There are great schools we can send him to. There are places where he can be
taught to be independent.” I had snapped at her: I had accused her of writing
him off so quickly, so easily. Later, I felt ashamed about this. Later, I admired
her: I admired how rapidly, how fluidly, she was adjusting to the fact that the
child she thought she would have was not the child she did have. I admired
how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope
he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you,
whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as
pleasure at all—and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to
bring him. For the rest of Jacob’s life, I lagged one step behind Liesl: I kept
dreaming he would get better, that he would return to what he had been; she,
however, thought only about the life he could have given the current realities
of his situation. Maybe he could go to a special school. Okay, he couldn’t go
to school at all, but maybe he could be in a playgroup. Okay, he wouldn’t be
able to be in a playgroup, but maybe he would be able to live a long life
anyway. Okay, he wouldn’t live a long life, but maybe he could live a short
happy life. Okay, he couldn’t live a short happy life, but maybe he could live
a short life with dignity: we could give him that, and she would hope for
nothing else for him.

I was thirty-two when he was born, thirty-six when he was diagnosed,
thirty-seven when he died. It was November tenth, just less than a year after
his first seizure. We had a service at the university, and even in my deadened
state, I saw all the people—our parents, our friends and colleagues, and
Jacob’s friends, first graders now, and their parents—who had come, and had
cried.

My parents went home to New York. Liesl and I eventually went back to
work. For months, we barely spoke. We couldn’t even touch each other. Part
of it was exhaustion, but we were also ashamed: of our mutual failure, of the
unfair but unshakable feeling that each of us could have done better, that the
other person hadn’t quite risen to the occasion. A year after Jacob died, we
had our first conversation about whether we should have another child, and
although it began politely, it ended awfully, in recriminations: about how I

had never wanted Jacob in the first place, about how she had never wanted
him, about how I had failed, about how she had. We stopped talking; we
apologized. We tried again. But every discussion ended the same way. They
were not conversations from which it was possible to recover, and eventually,
we separated.

It amazes me now how thoroughly we stopped communicating. The
divorce was very clean, very easy—perhaps too clean, too easy. It made me
wonder what had brought us together before Jacob—had we not had him, how
and for what would we have stayed together? It was only later that I was able
to remember why I had loved Liesl, what I had seen and admired in her. But
at the time, we were like two people who’d had a single mission, difficult and
draining, and now the mission was over, and it was time for us to part and
return to our regular lives.

For many years, we didn’t speak—not out of acrimony, but out of
something else. She moved to Portland. Shortly after I met Julia, I ran into
Sally—she had moved as well, to Los Angeles—who was in town visiting her
parents and who told me that Liesl had remarried. I told Sally to send her my
best, and Sally said she would.

Sometimes I would look her up: she was teaching at the medical school at
the University of Oregon. Once I had a student who looked so much like what
we had always imagined Jacob would look like that I nearly called her. But I
never did.

And then, one day, she called me. It had been sixteen years. She was in
town for a conference, and asked if I wanted to have lunch. It was strange,
both foreign and instantly familiar, to hear her voice again, that voice with
which I’d had thousands of conversations, about things both important and
mundane. That voice I had heard sing to Jacob as he juddered in her arms,
that voice I had heard say “This is the best one yet!” as she took a picture of
the day’s tower of blocks.

We met at a restaurant near the medical college’s campus that had
specialized in what it had called “upscale hummus” when she was a resident
and which we had considered a special treat. Now it was a place that
specialized in artisanal meatballs, but it still smelled, interestingly, of
hummus.

We saw each other; she looked as I had remembered her. We hugged and
sat. For a while we spoke of work, of Sally and her new girlfriend, of
Laurence and Gillian. She told me about her husband, an epidemiologist, and
I told her about Julia. She’d had another child, a girl, when she was forty-
three. She showed me a picture. She was beautiful, the girl, and looked just

like Liesl. I told her so, and she smiled. “And you?” she asked. “Did you ever
have another?”

I did, I said. I had just adopted one of my former students. I could see she
was surprised, but she smiled, and congratulated me, and asked me about him,
and how it had happened, and I told her.

“That’s great, Harold,” she said, after I’d finished. And then, “You love
him a lot.”

“I do,” I said.

I would like to tell you that it was the beginning of a sort of second-stage
friendship for us, that we stayed in touch and that every year, we would talk
about Jacob, what he could have been. But it wasn’t, though not in a bad way.
I did tell her, in that meeting, about that student of mine who had so unnerved
me, and she said that she understood exactly what I meant, and that she too
had had students—or had simply passed young men in the street—whom she
thought she recognized from somewhere, only to realize later that she had
imagined they might be our son, alive and well and away from us, no longer
ours, but walking freely through the world, unaware that we might have been
searching for him all this time.

I hugged her goodbye; I wished her well. I told her I cared about her. She
said all the same things. Neither of us offered to stay in touch with the other;
both of us, I like to think, had too much respect for the other to do so.

But over the years, at odd moments, I would hear from her. I would get an
e-mail that read only “Another sighting,” and I would know what she meant,
because I sent her those e-mails, too: “Harvard Square, appx 25-y-o, 6′2″,
skinny, reeking of pot.” When her daughter graduated from college, she sent
me an announcement, and then another for her daughter’s wedding, and a
third when her first grandchild was born.

I love Julia. She was a scientist too, but she was always so different from
Liesl—cheery where Liesl was composed, expressive where Liesl was
interior, innocent in her delights and enthusiasms. But as much as I love her,
for many years a part of me couldn’t stop feeling that I had something deeper,
something more profound with Liesl. We had made someone together, and we
had watched him die together. Sometimes I felt that there was something
physical connecting us, a long rope that stretched between Boston and
Portland: when she tugged on her end, I felt it on mine. Wherever she went,
wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched
and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we
would never have again.

After Julia and I decided we were going to adopt him, about six months
before we actually asked him, I told Laurence. I knew Laurence liked him a
great deal, and respected him, and thought he was good for me, and I also
knew that Laurence—being Laurence—would be wary.

He was. We had a long talk. “You know how much I like him,” he said,
“but really, Harold, how much do you actually know about this kid?”

“Not much,” I said. But I knew he wasn’t Laurence’s worst possible
scenario: I knew he wasn’t a thief, that he wasn’t going to come kill me and
Julia in our bed at night. Laurence knew this, too.

Of course, I also knew, without knowing for certain, without any real
evidence, that something had gone very wrong for him at some point. That
first time you were all up in Truro, I came down to the kitchen late one night
and found JB sitting at the table, drawing. I always thought JB was a different
person when he was alone, when he was certain he didn’t have to perform,
and I sat and looked at what he was sketching—pictures of all of you—and
asked him about what he was studying in grad school, and he told me about
people whose work he admired, three-fourths of whom were unknown to me.

As I was leaving to go upstairs, JB called my name, and I came back.
“Listen,” he said. He sounded embarrassed. “I don’t want to be rude or
anything, but you should lay off asking him so many questions.”

I sat down again. “Why?”

He was uncomfortable, but determined. “He doesn’t have any parents,” he
said. “I don’t know the circumstances, but he won’t even discuss it with us.
Not with me, anyway.” He stopped. “I think something terrible happened to
him when he was a kid.”

“What kind of terrible?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We’re not really certain, but we think it must be really
bad physical abuse. Haven’t you noticed he never takes off his clothes, or
how he never lets anyone touch him? I think someone must have beat him, or
—” He stopped. He was loved, he was protected; he didn’t have the courage
to conjure what might have followed that or, and neither did I. But I had
noticed, of course—I hadn’t been asking to make him uncomfortable, but
even when I saw that it did make him uncomfortable, I hadn’t been able to
stop.

“Harold,” Julia would say after he left at night, “you’re making him
uneasy.”

“I know, I know,” I’d say. I knew nothing good lay behind his silence, and

as much as I didn’t want to hear what the story was, I wanted to hear it as
well.

About a month before the adoption went through, he turned up at the house
one weekend, very unexpectedly: I came in from my tennis game, and there
he was on the couch, asleep. He had come to talk to me, he had come to try to
confess something to me. But in the end, he couldn’t.

That night Andy called me in a panic looking for him, and when I asked
Andy why he was calling him at midnight anyway, he quickly turned vague.
“He’s been having a really hard time,” he said.

“Because of the adoption?” I asked.

“I can’t really say,” he said, primly—as you know, doctor-patient
confidentiality was something Andy adhered to irregularly but with great
dedication when he did. And then you called, and made up your own vague
stories.

The next day, I asked Laurence if he could find out if he had any juvenile
records in his name. I knew it was unlikely that he’d discover anything, and
even if he did, the records would be sealed.

I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t
matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered
to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of
course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came
the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I
would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he
was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what
it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did,
when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he
have been, and who would I have been?

Laurence’s search turned up nothing, and I was relieved and disappointed.
The adoption happened; it was a wonderful day, one of the best. I never
regretted it. But being his parent was never easy. He had all sorts of rules he’d
constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must
have taught him—what he wasn’t entitled to; what he mustn’t enjoy; what he
mustn’t hope or wish for; what he mustn’t covet—and it took some years to
figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to
convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules
by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world
explicable to him. He was terrifically disciplined—he was in everything—and
discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible quality to get someone to
abandon.

Equally difficult was my (and your) attempts to get him to abandon certain
ideas about himself: about how he looked, and what he deserved, and what he
was worth, and who he was. I have still never met anyone as neatly or
severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly confident in some
realms and so utterly despondent in others. I remember watching him in court
once and feeling both awed and chilled. He was defending one of those
pharmaceutical companies in whose care and protection he had made his
name in a federal whistle-blower suit. It was a big suit, a major suit—it is on
dozens of syllabi now—but he was very, very calm; I have rarely seen a
litigator so calm. On the stand was the whistle-blower in question, a middle-
aged woman, and he was so relentless, so dogged, so pointed, that the
courtroom was silent, watching him. He never raised his voice, he was never
sarcastic, but I could see that he relished it, that this very act, catching that
witness in her inconsistencies—which were slight, very slight, so slight
another lawyer might have missed them—was nourishing to him, that he
found pleasure in it. He was a gentle person (though not to himself), gentle in
manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself
away and left behind something brutal and cold. This was about seven months
after the incident with Caleb, five months before the incident to follow, and as
I watched him reciting the witness’s own statements back to her, never
glancing down at the notepad before him, his face still and handsome and
self-assured, I kept seeing him in the car that terrible night, when he had
turned from me and had protected his head with his hands when I reached out
to touch the side of his face, as if I were another person who would try to hurt
him. His very existence was twinned: there was who he was at work and who
he was outside of it; there was who he was then and who he had been; there
was who he was in court and who he had been in the car, so alone with
himself that I had been frightened.

That night, uptown, I had paced in circles, thinking about what I had
learned about him, what I had seen, how hard I had fought to keep from
howling when I heard him say the things he had—worse than Caleb, worse
than what Caleb had said, was hearing that he believed it, that he was so
wrong about himself. I suppose I had always known he felt this way, but
hearing him say it so baldly was even worse than I could have imagined. I
will never forget him saying “when you look like I do, you have to take what
you can get.” I will never forget the despair and anger and hopelessness I felt
when I heard him say that. I will never forget his face when he saw Caleb,
when Caleb sat down next to him, and I was too slow to understand what was
happening. How can you call yourself a parent if your child feels this way
about himself? That was something I would never be able to recalibrate. I
suppose—having never parented an adult myself—that I had never known

how much was actually involved. I didn’t resent having to do it: I felt only
stupid and inadequate that I hadn’t realized it earlier. After all, I had been an
adult with a parent, and I had turned to my father constantly.

I called Julia, who was in Santa Fe at a conference about new diseases, and
told her what had happened, and she gave a long, sad sigh. “Harold,” she
began, and then stopped. We’d had conversations about what his life had been
before us, and although both of us were wrong, her guesses would turn out to
be more accurate than mine, although at the time I had thought them
ridiculous, impossible.

“I know,” I said.

“You have to call him.”

But I had been. I called and called and the phone rang and rang.

That night I lay awake alternately worrying and having the kinds of
fantasies men have: guns, hit men, vengeance. I had waking dreams in which
I called Gillian’s cousin, who was a detective in New York, and had Caleb
Porter arrested. I had dreams in which I called you, and you and Andy and I
staked out his apartment and killed him.

The next morning I left early, before eight, and bought bagels and orange
juice and went down to Greene Street. It was a gray day, soggy and humid,
and I rang the buzzer three times, each for several seconds, before stepping
back toward the curb, squinting up at the sixth floor.

I was about to buzz again when I heard his voice coming over the speaker:
“Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Can I come up?” There was no response. “I want to
apologize,” I said. “I need to see you. I brought bagels.”

There was another silence. “Hello?” I asked.

“Harold,” he said, and I noticed his voice sounded funny. Muffled, as if his
mouth had grown an extra set of teeth and he was speaking around them. “If I
let you up, do you promise you won’t get angry and start yelling?”

I was quiet then, myself. I didn’t know what this meant. “Yes,” I said, and
after a second or two, the door clicked open.

I stepped off the elevator, and for a minute, I saw nothing, just that lovely
apartment with its walls of light. And then I heard my name and looked down
and saw him.

I nearly dropped the bagels. I felt my limbs turn to stone. He was sitting on
the ground, but leaning on his right hand for support, and as I knelt beside

him, he turned his head away and held his left hand before his face as if to
shield himself.

“He took the spare set of keys,” he said, and his face was so swollen that
his lips barely had room to move. “I came home last night and he was here.”
He turned toward me then, and his face was an animal skinned and turned
inside out and left in the heat, its organs melting together into a pudding of
flesh: all I could see of his eyes were their long line of lashes, a smudge of
black against his cheeks, which were a horrible blue, the blue of decay, of
mold. I thought he might have been crying then, but he didn’t cry. “I’m sorry,
Harold, I’m so sorry.”

I made sure I wasn’t going to start shouting—not at him, just shouting to
express something I couldn’t say—before I spoke to him. “We’re going to get
you better,” I said. “We’re going to call the police, and then—”

“No,” he said. “Not the police.”

“We have to,” I said. “Jude. You have to.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t report it. I can’t”—he took a breath—“I can’t take
the humiliation. I can’t.”

“All right,” I said, thinking that I would discuss this with him later. “But
what if he comes back?”

He shook his head, just slightly. “He won’t,” he said, in his new mumbly
voice.

I was beginning to feel light-headed from the effort of suppressing the need
to run out and find Caleb and kill him, from the effort of accepting that
someone had done this to him, from seeing him, someone who was so
dignified, who made certain to always be composed and neat, so beaten, so
helpless. “Where’s your chair?” I asked him.

He made a sound like a bleat, and said something so quietly I had to ask
him to repeat it, though I could see how much pain it caused him to speak.
“Down the stairs,” he finally said, and this time, I was certain he was crying,
although he couldn’t even open his eyes enough for tears. He began to shake.

I was shaking myself by this point. I left him there, sitting on the floor, and
went to retrieve his wheelchair, which had been thrown down the stairs so
hard that it had bounced off the far wall and was halfway down to the fourth
floor. On the way back to him, I noticed the floor was tacky with something,
and saw too a large bright splash of vomit near the dining-room table,
congealed into paste.

“Put your arm around my neck,” I told him, and he did, and as I lifted him,

he cried out, and I apologized and settled him in his chair. As I did, I noticed
that the back of his shirt—he was wearing one of those gray thermal-weave
sweatshirts he liked to sleep in—was bloody, with new and old blood, and the
back of his pants were bloody as well.

I stepped away from him and called Andy, told him I had an emergency. I
was lucky: Andy had stayed in the city that weekend, and he would meet us at
his office in twenty minutes.

I drove us there. I helped him out of the car—he seemed unwilling to use
his left arm, and when I had him stand, he held his right leg aloft, so that it
wouldn’t touch the ground, and made a strange noise, a bird’s noise, as I
wrapped my arm around his chest to lower him into the chair—and when
Andy opened the door and saw him, I thought he was going to throw up.

“Jude,” Andy said once he could speak, crouching beside him, but he didn’t
respond.

Once we’d installed him in an examination room, we spoke in the
receptionist’s area. I told him about Caleb. I told him what I thought had
happened. I told him what I thought was wrong: that I thought he had broken
his left arm, that something was wrong with his right leg, that he was bleeding
and where, that the floors had blood on them. I told him he wouldn’t report it
to the police.

“Okay,” Andy said. He was in shock, I could see. He kept swallowing.
“Okay, okay.” He stopped and rubbed at his eyes. “Will you wait here for a
little while?”

He came out from the examining room forty minutes later. “I’m going to
take him to the hospital to get some X-rays,” he said. “I’m pretty sure his left
wrist is broken, and some of his ribs. And if his leg is—” He stopped. “If it is,
this is really going to be a problem,” he said. He seemed to have forgotten I
was in the room. Then he recalled himself. “You should go,” he said. “I’ll call
you when I’m almost done.”

“I’ll stay,” I said.

“Don’t, Harold,” he said, and then, more gently, “you have to call his
office; there’s no way he can go into work this week.” He paused. “He said—
he said you should tell them he was in a car accident.”

As I was leaving, he said, quietly, “He told me he was playing tennis.”

“I know,” I said. I felt bad for us, then, for being so stupid. “He told me
that, too.”

I went back to Greene Street with his keys. For a long time, many minutes,

I just stood there in the doorway, looking at the space. Some of the cloud
cover had parted, but it didn’t take much sun—even with the shades drawn—
to make that apartment feel light. I had always thought it a hopeful place, with
its high ceilings, its cleanliness, its visibility, its promise of transparency.

This was his apartment, and so of course there were lots of cleaning
products, and I started cleaning. I mopped the floors; the sticky areas were
dried blood. It was difficult to distinguish because the floors were so dark, but
I could smell it, a dense, wild scent that the nose instantly recognizes. He had
clearly tried to clean the bathroom, but here too there were swipes of blood on
the marble, dried into the rusty pinks of sunsets; these were difficult to
remove, but I did the best I could. I looked in the trash cans—for evidence, I
suppose, but there was nothing: they had all been cleaned and emptied. His
clothes from the night before were scattered near the living-room sofa. The
shirt was so ripped, clawed at almost, that I threw it away; the suit I took to be
dry-cleaned. Otherwise, the apartment was very tidy. I had entered the
bedroom with dread, expecting to find lamps broken, clothes strewn about,
but it was so unruffled that you might have thought that no one lived there at
all, that it was a model house, an advertisement for an enviable life. The
person who lived here would have parties, and would be carefree and sure of
himself, and at night he would raise the shades and he and his friends would
dance, and people passing by on Greene Street, on Mercer, would look up at
that box of light floating in the sky, and imagine its inhabitants above
unhappiness, or fear, or any concerns at all.

I e-mailed Lucien, whom I’d met once, and who was a friend of a friend of
Laurence’s, actually, and said there had been a terrible car accident, and that
Jude was in the hospital. I went to the grocery store and bought things that
would be easy for him to eat: soups, puddings, juices. I looked up Caleb
Porter’s address, and repeated it to myself—Fifty West Twenty-ninth Street,
apartment 17J—until I had it memorized. I called the locksmith and said it
was an emergency and that I needed to have all the locks changed: front door,
elevator, apartment door. I opened the windows to let the damp air carry away
the fragrance of blood, of disinfectant. I left a message with the law school
secretary saying there was a family emergency and I wouldn’t be able to teach
that week. I left messages for a couple of my colleagues asking if they could
cover for me. I thought about calling my old law school friend, who worked
at the D.A.’s office. I would explain what had happened; I wouldn’t use his
name. I would ask how we could have Caleb Porter arrested.

“But you’re saying the victim won’t report it?” Avi would say.

“Well, yes,” I’d have to admit.

“Can he be convinced?”

“I don’t think so,” I’d have to admit.

“Well, Harold,” Avi would say, perplexed and irritated. “I don’t know what
to tell you, then. You know as well as I do that I can’t do anything if the
victim won’t speak.” I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a
flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little
comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protections the most.

And then I went into his bathroom and felt under the sink and found his bag
of razors and cotton pads and threw it down the incinerator. I hated that bag, I
hated that I knew I would find it.

Seven years before, he had come to the house in Truro in early May. It had
been a spontaneous visit: I was up there trying to write, there were cheap
tickets, I told him he should come, and to my surprise—he never left the
offices of Rosen Pritchard, even then—he did. He was happy that day, and so
was I. I left him chopping a head of purple cabbage in the kitchen and took
the plumber upstairs, where he was installing a new toilet in our bathroom,
and then on his way out asked him if he could come take a look at the sink in
the downstairs bathroom, the one in Jude’s room, which had been leaking.

He did, tightened something, changed something else, and then, as he was
emerging from the cabinet, handed something to me. “This was taped under
the basin,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, taking the package from him.

He shrugged. “Dunno. But it was stuck there pretty good, with duct tape.”
He repacked his things as I stood there dumbly, staring at the bag, and gave
me a wave and left; I heard him say goodbye to Jude as he walked out,
whistling.

I looked at the bag. It was a regular, pint-size clear plastic bag, and inside it
was a stack of ten razor blades, and individually packaged alcohol wipes, and
pieces of gauze, folded into springy squares, and bandages. I stood there,
holding this bag, and I knew what it was for, even though I had never seen
proof of it, and had indeed never seen anything like it. But I knew.

I went to the kitchen, and there he was, washing off a bowlful of
fingerlings, still happy. He was even humming something, very softly, which
he did only when he was very contented, like how a cat purrs to itself when
it’s alone in the sun. “You should’ve told me you needed help installing the
toilet,” he said, not looking up. “I could have done it for you and saved you a
bill.” He knew how to do all those things: plumbing, electrical work,
carpentry, gardening. We once went to Laurence’s so he could explain to
Laurence how, exactly, he could safely unearth the young crabapple tree from

one corner of his backyard and successfully move it to another, one that got
more sun.

For a while I stood there watching him. I felt so many things at once that
together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling
caused by a surplus of feeling. Finally I said his name, and he looked up.
“What’s this?” I asked him, and held the bag in front of him.

He went very still, one hand suspended above the bowl, and I remember
watching how little droplets of water beaded and dripped off the ends of his
fingertips, as if he had slashed himself with a knife and was bleeding water.
He opened his mouth, and shut it.

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said, very softly. He lowered his hand, and dried it,
slowly, on the dish towel.

That made me angry. “I’m not asking you to apologize, Jude,” I told him.
“I’m asking you what this is. And don’t say ‘It’s a bag with razors in it.’ What
is this? Why did you tape it beneath your sink?”

He stared at me for a long time with that look he had—I know you know
the one—where you can see him receding even as he looks at you, where you
can see the gates within him closing and locking themselves, the bridges
being cranked above the moat. “You know what it’s for,” he finally said, still
very quietly.

“I want to hear you say it,” I told him.

“I just need it,” he said.

“Tell me what you do with these,” I said, and watched him.

He looked down into the bowl of potatoes. “Sometimes I need to cut
myself,” he said, finally. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

And suddenly I was panicked, and my panic made me irrational. “What the
fuck does that mean?” I asked him—I may have even shouted it.

He was moving backward now, toward the sink, as if I might lunge at him
and he wanted some distance. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

“How often is sometimes?” I asked.

He too was panicking now, I could see. “I don’t know,” he said. “It varies.”

“Well, estimate. Give me a ballpark.”

“I don’t know,” he said, desperate, “I don’t know. A few times a week, I
guess.”

“A few times a week!” I said, and then stopped. Suddenly I had to get out

of there. I took my coat from the chair and crammed the bag into its inside
pocket. “You’d better be here when I get back,” I told him, and left. (He was a
bolter: whenever he thought Julia or I were displeased with him, he would try
as quickly as he could to get out of our sight, as if he were an offending object
that needed to be removed.)

I walked downstairs, toward the beach, and then through the dunes, feeling
the sort of rage that comes with the realization of one’s gross inadequacy, of
knowing for certain that you are at fault. It was the first time I realized that as
much as he was two people around us, so were we two people around him: we
saw of him what we wanted, and allowed ourselves not to see anything else.
We were so ill-equipped. Most people are easy: their unhappinesses are our
unhappinesses, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing
are fast-moving and negotiable. But his were not. We didn’t know how to
help him because we lacked the imagination needed to diagnose the problems.
But this is making excuses.

By the time I returned to the house it was almost dark, and I could see,
through the window, his outline moving about in the kitchen. I sat on a chair
on the porch and wished Julia were there, that she wasn’t in England with her
father.

The back door opened. “Dinner,” he said, quietly, and I got up to go inside.

He’d made one of my favorite meals: the sea bass I had bought the day
before, poached, and potatoes roasted the way he knew I liked them, with lots
of thyme and carrots, and a cabbage salad that I knew would have the
mustard-seed dressing I liked. But I didn’t have an appetite for any of it. He
served me, and then himself, and sat.

“This looks wonderful,” I told him. “Thank you for making it.” He nodded.
We both looked at our plates, at his lovely meal that neither of us would eat.

“Jude,” I said, “I have to apologize. I’m really sorry—I never should have
run out on you like that.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I understand.”

“No,” I told him. “It was wrong of me. I was just so upset.”

He looked back down. “Do you know why I was upset?” I asked him.

“Because,” he began, “because I brought that into your house.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not why. Jude, this house isn’t just my house, or
Julia’s: it’s yours, too. I want you to feel you can bring anything you’d have at
home here.

“I’m upset because you’re doing this terrible thing to yourself.” He didn’t

look up. “Do your friends know you do this? Does Andy?”

He nodded, slightly. “Willem knows,” he said, in a low voice. “And Andy.”

“And what does Andy say about this?” I asked, thinking, Goddammit,
Andy.

“He says—he says I should see a therapist.”

“And have you?” He shook his head, and I felt rage build up in me again.
“Why not?” I asked him, but he didn’t say anything. “Is there a bag like this
in Cambridge?” I said, and after a silence, he looked up at me and nodded
again.

“Jude,” I said, “why do you do this to yourself?”

For a long time, he was quiet, and I was quiet too. I listened to the sea.
Finally, he said, “A few reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes it’s because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make
physical what I feel,” he began, and glanced at me before looking down
again. “And sometimes it’s because I feel so many things and I need to feel
nothing at all—it helps clear them away. And sometimes it’s because I feel
happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t.”

“Why?” I asked him once I could speak again, but he only shook his head
and didn’t answer, and I too went silent.

He took a breath. “Look,” he said, suddenly, decisively, looking at me
directly, “if you want to dissolve the adoption, I’ll understand.”

I was so stunned that I was angry—that hadn’t even occurred to me. I was
about to bark something back when I looked at him, at how he was trying to
be brave, and saw that he was terrified: He really did think this was something
I might want to do. He really would understand if I said I did. He was
expecting it. Later, I realized that in those years just after the adoption, he was
always wondering how permanent it was, always wondering what he would
eventually do that would make me disown him.

“I would never,” I said, as firmly as I could.

That night, I tried to talk to him. He was ashamed of what he did, I could
see that, but he genuinely couldn’t understand why I cared so much, why it so
upset you and me and Andy. “It’s not fatal,” he kept saying, as if that were the
concern, “I know how to control it.” He wouldn’t see a shrink, but he couldn’t
tell me why. He hated doing it, I could tell, but he also couldn’t conceive of a
life without it. “I need it,” he kept saying. “I need it. It makes things right.”

But surely, I told him, there was a time in your life when you didn’t have it?,
and he shook his head. “I need it,” he repeated. “It helps me, Harold, you
have to believe me on this one.”

“Why do you need it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It helps me control my life,” he said, finally.

At the end, there was nothing more I could say. “I’m keeping this,” I said,
holding the bag up, and he winced, and nodded. “Jude,” I said, and he looked
back at me. “If I throw this away, are you going to make another one?”

He was very quiet, then, looking at his plate. “Yes,” he said.

I threw it out anyway, of course, stuffing it deep into a garbage bag that I
carried to the Dumpster at the end of the road. We cleaned the kitchen in
silence—we were both exhausted, and neither of us had eaten anything—and
then he went to bed, and I did as well. In those days I was still trying to be
respectful of his personal space, or I’d have grabbed him and held him, but I
didn’t.

But as I was lying awake in bed, I thought of him, his long fingers craving
the slice of the razor between them, and went downstairs to the kitchen. I got
the big mixing bowl from the drawer beneath the oven, and began loading it
with everything sharp I could find: knives and scissors and corkscrews and
lobster picks. And then I took it with me to the living room, where I sat in my
chair, the one facing the sea, clasping the bowl in my arms.

I woke to a creaking. The kitchen floorboards were noisy, and I sat up in
the dark, willing myself to stay silent, and listened to his walk, the distinctive
soft stamp of his left foot followed by the swish of his right, and then a
drawer opening and, a few seconds later, shutting. Then another drawer, then
another, until he had opened and shut every drawer, every cupboard. He
hadn’t turned on the light—there was moonlight enough—and I could
envision him standing in the newly blunt world of the kitchen, understanding
that I’d taken everything from him: I had even taken the forks. I sat, holding
my breath, listening to the silence from the kitchen. For a moment it was
almost as if we were having a conversation, a conversation without words or
sight. And then, finally, I heard him turn and his footsteps retreating, back to
his room.

When I got home to Cambridge the next night, I went to his bathroom and
found another bag, a double of the Truro one, and threw it away. But I never
found another of those bags again in either Cambridge or Truro. He must have
found some other place to hide them, someplace I never discovered, because
he couldn’t have carried those blades back and forth on the plane. But

whenever I was at Greene Street, I would find an opportunity to sneak off to
his bathroom. Here, he kept the bag in his same old hiding place, and every
time, I would steal it, and shove it into my pocket, and then throw it away
after I left. He must have known I did this, of course, but we never discussed
it. Every time it would be replaced. Until he learned he had to hide it from
you as well, there was not a single time I checked that I failed to find it. Still,
I never stopped checking: whenever I was at the apartment, or later, the house
upstate, or the flat in London, I would go to his bathroom and look for that
bag. I never found it again. Malcolm’s bathrooms were so simple, so clean-
lined, and yet even in them he had found somewhere to conceal it, somewhere
I would never again discover.

Over the years, I tried to talk about it with him. The day after I found the
first bag, I called Andy and started yelling at him, and Andy,
uncharacteristically, let me. “I know,” he said. “I know.” And then: “Harold,
I’m not asking sarcastically or rhetorically. I want you to tell me: What should
I do?” And of course, I didn’t know what to tell him.

You were the one who got furthest with him. But I know you blamed
yourself. I blamed myself, too. Because I did something worse than accepting
it: I tolerated it. I chose to forget he was doing this, because it was too
difficult to find a solution, and because I wanted to enjoy him as the person he
wanted us to see, even though I knew better. I told myself that I was letting
him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of nights, he
sacrificed it. I would rebuke him and try to reason with him, even though I
knew those methods didn’t work, and even knowing that, I didn’t try
something else: something more radical, something that might alienate me
from him. I knew I was being a coward, because I never told Julia about that
bag, I never told her what I had learned about him that night in Truro.
Eventually she found out, and it was one of the very few times I’d seen her so
angry. “How could you let this keep happening?” she asked me. “How could
you let this go on for this long?” She never said she held me directly
responsible, but I knew she did, and how could she not? I did, too.

And now here I was in his apartment, where a few hours ago, while I was
lying awake, he was being beaten. I sat down on the sofa with my phone in
my hand to wait for Andy’s call, telling me that he was ready to be returned to
me, that he was ready to be released into my care. I opened the shade across
from me and sat back down and stared into the steely sky until each cloud
blurred into the next, until finally I could see nothing at all, only a haze of
gray as the day slowly slurred into night.

Andy called at six that evening, nine hours after I’d dropped him off, and

met me at the door. “He’s asleep in the examining room,” he said. And then:
“Broken left wrist, four broken ribs, thank Christ no broken bones in his legs.
No concussion, thank god. Fractured coccyx. Dislocated shoulder, which I
reset. Bruising all up and down his back and torso; he was kicked, clearly. But
no internal bleeding. His face looks worse than it is: his eyes and nose are
fine, no breaks, and I iced the bruising, which you have to do, too—regularly.

“Lacerations on his legs. This is what I’m worried about. I’ve written you a
scrip for antibiotics; I’m going to start him on a low dosage as a preventative
measure, but if he mentions feeling hot, or chilled, you have to let me know
right away—the last thing he needs is an infection there. His back is stripped
—”

“What do you mean, ‘stripped’?” I asked him.

He looked impatient. “Flayed,” he said. “He was whipped, probably with a
belt, but he wouldn’t tell me. I bandaged them, but I’m giving you this
antibiotic ointment and you’re going to need to keep the wounds cleaned and
change the dressings starting tomorrow. He’s not going to want to let you, but
it’s too fucking bad. I wrote down all the instructions in here.”

He handed me a plastic bag; I looked inside: bottles of pills, rolls of
bandages, tubes of cream. “These,” said Andy, plucking something out, “are
painkillers, and he hates them. But he’s going to need them; make him take a
pill every twelve hours: once in the morning, once at night. They’re going to
make him woozy, so don’t let him outside on his own, don’t let him lift
anything. They’re also going to make him nauseated, but you have to make
him eat: something simple, like rice and broth. Try to make him stay in his
chair; he’s not going to want to move around much anyway.

“I called his dentist and made an appointment for Monday at nine; he’s lost
a couple of teeth. The most important thing is that he sleeps as much as he
can; I’ll stop by tomorrow afternoon and every night this week. Do not let
him go to work, although—I don’t think he’ll want to.”

He stopped as abruptly as he’d started, and we stood there in silence. “I
can’t fucking believe this,” Andy said, finally. “That fucking asshole. I want
to find that fuck and kill him.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

He shook his head. “He wouldn’t let me report it,” he said. “I begged him.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

It was a shock anew to see him, and he shook his head when I tried to help
him into the chair, and so we stood and watched as he lowered himself into

the seat, still in his same clothes, the blood now dried into rusty continents.
“Thank you, Andy,” he said, very quietly. “I’m sorry,” and Andy placed his
palm on the back of his head and said nothing.

By the time we got back to Greene Street, it was dark. His wheelchair was,
as you know, one of those very lightweight, elegant ones, one so aggressive
about its user’s self-sufficiency that there were no handles on it, because it
was assumed that the person in it would never allow himself the indignity of
being pushed by another. You had to grab the top of the backrest, which was
very low, and guide the chair that way. I stopped in the entryway to turn on
the lights, and we both blinked.

“You cleaned,” he said.

“Well, yes,” I said. “Not as good a job as you would’ve done, I’m afraid.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. We were quiet. “Why don’t I help you get changed and
then you can have something to eat?”

He shook his head. “No, thank you. But I’m not hungry. And I can do it
myself.” Now he was subdued, controlled: the person I had seen earlier was
gone, caged once more in his labyrinth in some little-opened cellar. He was
always polite, but when he was trying to protect himself or assert his
competency, he became more so: polite and slightly remote, as if he was an
explorer among a dangerous tribe, and was being careful not to find himself
too involved in their goings-on.

I sighed, inwardly, and took him to his room; I told him I’d be here if he
needed me, and he nodded. I sat on the floor outside the closed door and
waited: I could hear the faucets turning on and off, and then his steps, and
then a long period of silence, and then the sigh of the bed as he sat on it.

When I went in, he was under the covers, and I sat down next to him, on
the edge of the bed. “Are you sure you don’t want to eat anything?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and after a pause, he looked at me. He could open his eyes
now, and against the white of the sheets, he was the loamy, fecund colors of
camouflage: the jungle-green of his eyes, and the streaky gold-and-brown of
his hair, and his face, less blue than it had been this morning and now a dark
shimmery bronze. “Harold, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you
last night, and I’m sorry I cause so many problems for you. I’m sorry that—”

“Jude,” I interrupted him, “you don’t need to be sorry. I’m sorry. I wish I
could make this better for you.”

He closed his eyes, and opened them, and looked away from me. “I’m so

ashamed,” he said, softly.

I stroked his hair, then, and he let me. “You don’t have to be,” I said. “You
didn’t do anything wrong.” I wanted to cry, but I thought he might, and if he
wanted to, I would try not to. “You know that, right?” I asked him. “You
know this wasn’t your fault, you know you didn’t deserve this?” He said
nothing, so I kept asking, and asking, until finally he gave a small nod. “You
know that guy is a fucking asshole, right?” I asked him, and he turned his face
away. “You know you’re not to blame, right?” I asked him. “You know that
this says nothing about you and what you’re worth?”

“Harold,” he said. “Please.” And I stopped, although really, I should have
kept going.

For a while we said nothing. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, and after a
second or two, he nodded again. I didn’t even know what I was going to say
until I was saying it, and as I was saying it, I didn’t know where it had come
from, other than I suppose it was something I had always known and had
never wanted to ask, because I dreaded his answer: I knew what it would be,
and I didn’t want to hear it. “Were you sexually abused as a child?”

I could sense, rather than see, him stiffen, and under my hand, I could feel
him shudder. He still hadn’t looked at me, and now he rolled to his left side,
moving his bandaged arm to the pillow next to him. “Jesus, Harold,” he said,
finally.

I withdrew my hand. “How old were you when it happened?” I asked.

There was a pause, and then he pushed his face into the pillow. “Harold,”
he said, “I’m really tired. I need to sleep.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, which jumped, but I held on. Beneath my
palm I could feel his muscles tense, could feel that shiver running through
him. “It’s okay,” I told him. “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” I
said. “It’s not your fault, Jude, do you understand me?” But he was pretending
to be asleep, though I could still feel that vibration, everything in his body
alert and alarmed.

I sat there for a while longer, watching him hold himself rigid. Finally I
left, closing the door behind me.

I stayed for the rest of the week. You called him that night, and I answered
his phone and lied to you, said something useless about an accident, heard the
worry in your voice and wanted so badly to tell you the truth. The next day,
you called again and I listened outside his door as he lied to you as well: “A
car accident. No. No, not serious. What? I was up at Richard’s house for the
weekend. I nodded off and hit a tree. I don’t know; I was tired—I’ve been

working a lot. No, a rental. Because mine’s in the shop. It’s not a big deal. No,
I’m going to be fine. No, you know Harold—he’s just overreacting. I promise.
I swear. No, he’s in Rome until the end of next month. Willem: I promise. It’s
fine! Okay. I know. Okay. I promise; I will. You too. Bye.”

Mostly, he was meek, tractable. He ate his soup every morning, he took his
pills. They made him logy. Every morning he was in his study, working, but
by eleven he was on the couch, sleeping. He slept through lunch, and all
afternoon, and I only woke him for dinner. You called him every night. Julia
called him, too: I always tried to eavesdrop, but couldn’t hear much of their
conversations, only that he didn’t say much, which meant Julia must have
been saying a great deal. Malcolm came over several times, and the Henry
Youngs and Elijah and Rhodes visited as well. JB sent over a drawing of an
iris; I had never known him to draw flowers before. He fought me, as Andy
had predicted, on the dressings on his legs and back, which he wouldn’t, no
matter how I pleaded with and shouted at him, let me see. He let Andy, and I
heard Andy say to him, “You’re going to need to come uptown every other
day and let me change these. I mean it.”

“Fine,” he snapped.

Lucien came to see him, but he was asleep in his study. “Don’t wake him,”
he said, and then, peeking in at him, “Jesus.” We talked for a bit, and he told
me about how admired he was at the firm, which is something you never get
tired of hearing about your child, whether he is four and in preschool and
excels with clay, or is forty and in a white-shoe firm and excels in the
protection of corporate criminals. “I’d say you must be proud of him, but I
think I know your politics too well for that.” He grinned. He liked Jude quite
a bit, I could tell, and I found myself feeling slightly jealous, and then stingy
for feeling jealous at all.

“No,” I said. “I am proud of him.” I felt bad then, for my years of scolding
him about Rosen Pritchard, the one place where he felt safe, the one place he
felt truly weightless, the one place where his fears and insecurities banished
themselves.

By the following Monday, the day before I left, he looked better: his cheeks
were the color of mustard, but the swelling had subsided, and you could see
the bones of his face again. It seemed to hurt him a little less to breathe, a
little less to speak, and his voice was less breathy, more like itself. Andy had
let him halve his morning pain dosage, and he was more alert, though not
exactly livelier. We played a game of chess, which he won.

“I’ll be back on Thursday evening,” I told him over dinner. I only had
classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays that semester.

“No,” he said, “you don’t have to. Thank you, Harold, but really—I’ll be
fine.”

“I already bought the ticket,” I said. “And anyway, Jude—you don’t always
have to say no, you know. Remember? Acceptance?” He didn’t say anything
else.

So what else can I tell you? He went back to work that Wednesday, despite
Andy’s suggestion he stay home through the end of the week. And despite his
threats, Andy came over every night to change his dressings and inspect his
legs. Julia returned, and every weekend in October, she or I would go to New
York and stay with him at Greene Street. Malcolm stayed with him during the
week. He didn’t like it, I could tell, but we decided we didn’t care what he
liked, not in this matter.

He got better. His legs didn’t get infected. Neither did his back. He was
lucky, Andy kept saying. He regained the weight he had lost. By the time you
came home, in early November, he was almost healed. By Thanksgiving,
which we had that year at the apartment in New York so he wouldn’t have to
travel, his cast had been removed and he was walking again. I watched him
closely over dinner, watched him talking with Laurence and laughing with
one of Laurence’s daughters, but couldn’t stop thinking of him that night, his
face when Caleb grabbed his wrist, his expression of pain and shame and fear.
I thought of the day I had learned he was using a wheelchair at all: it was
shortly after I had found the bag in Truro and was in the city for a conference,
and he had come into the restaurant in his chair, and I had been shocked.
“Why did you never tell me?” I asked, and he had pretended to be surprised,
acted like he thought he had. “No,” I said, “you hadn’t,” and finally he had
told me that he hadn’t wanted me to see him that way, as someone weak and
helpless. “I would never think of you that way,” I’d told him, and although I
didn’t think I did, it did change how I thought of him; it made me remember
that what I knew of him was just a tiny fraction of who he was.

It sometimes seemed as if that week had been a haunting, one that only
Andy and I had witnessed. In the months that followed, someone would
occasionally joke about it: his poor driving, his Wimbledon ambitions, and he
would laugh back, make some self-deprecating comment. He could never
look at me in those moments; I was a reminder of what had really happened, a
reminder of what he saw as his degradation.

But later, I would recognize how that incident had taken something large
from him, how it had changed him: into someone else, or maybe into
someone he had once been. I would see the months before Caleb as a period
in which he was healthier than he’d been: he had allowed me to hug him
when I saw him, and when I touched him—putting an arm around him as I

passed him in the kitchen—he would let me; his hand would go on chopping
the carrots before him in the same steady rhythm. It had taken twenty years
for that to happen. But after Caleb, he regressed. At Thanksgiving, I had gone
toward him to embrace him, but he had quickly stepped to the left—just a bit,
just enough so that my arms closed around air, and there had been a second in
which we looked at each other, and I knew that whatever I had been allowed
just a few months ago I would be no longer: I knew I would have to start all
over. I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting,
that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him. And that was the
worst thing, the most reprehensible thing. He had decided to believe Caleb, to
believe him over us, because Caleb confirmed what he had always thought
and always been taught, and it is always easier to believe what you already
think than to try to change your mind.

Later, when things got bad, I would wonder what I could have said or done.
Sometimes I would think that there was nothing I could have said—there was
something that might have helped, but none of us saying it could have
convinced him. I still had those fantasies: the gun, the posse, Fifty West
Twenty-ninth Street, apartment 17J. But this time we wouldn’t shoot. We
would take Caleb Porter by each arm, lead him down to the car, drive him to
Greene Street, drag him upstairs. We would tell him what to say, and warn
him that we would be just outside the door, waiting in the elevator, the pistol
cocked and pointed at his back. And from behind the door, we’d listen to what
he said: I didn’t mean any of it. I was completely wrong. The things I did, but
more than that, the things I said, they were meant for someone else. Believe
me, because you believed me before: you are beautiful and perfect, and I
never meant what I said. I was wrong, I was mistaken, no one could ever have
been more wrong than I was.

3

EVERY AFTERNOON AT four, after the last of his classes and before the first of his
chores, he had a free period of an hour, but on Wednesdays, he was given two
hours. Once, he had spent those afternoons reading or exploring the grounds,
but recently, ever since Brother Luke had told him he could, he had spent
them all at the greenhouse. If Luke was there, he would help the brother water
the plants, memorizing their names—Miltonia spectabilis, Alocasia
amazonica, Asystasia gangetica—so he could repeat them back to the brother
and be praised. “I think the Heliconia vellerigera’s grown,” he’d say, petting
its furred bracts, and Brother Luke would look at him and shake his head.
“Unbelievable,” he’d say. “My goodness, what a great memory you have,”
and he’d smile to himself, proud to have impressed the brother.

If Brother Luke wasn’t there, he instead passed the time playing with his
things. The brother had shown him how if he moved aside a stack of plastic
planters in the far corner of the room, there was a small grate, and if you
removed the grate, there was a small hole beneath, big enough to hold a
plastic garbage bag of his possessions. So he had unearthed his twigs and
stones from under the tree and moved his haul to the greenhouse, where it was
warm and humid, and where he could examine his objects without losing
feeling in his hands. Over the months, Luke had added to his collection: he
gave him a wafer of sea glass that the brother said was the color of his eyes,
and a metal whistle that had a round little ball within it that jangled like a bell
when you shook it, and a small cloth doll of a man wearing a woolen
burgundy top and a belt trimmed with tiny turquoise-colored beads that the
brother said had been made by a Navajo Indian, and had been his when he
was a boy. Two months ago, he had opened his bag and discovered that Luke
had left him a candy cane, and although it had been February, he had been
thrilled: he had always wanted to taste a candy cane, and he broke it into
sections, sucking each into a spear point before biting down on it, gnashing
the sugar into his molars.

The brother had told him that the next day he had to make sure to come
right away, as soon as classes ended, because he had a surprise for him. All
day he had been antsy and distracted, and although two of the brothers had hit
him—Michael, across the face; Peter, across the backside—he had barely
noticed. Only Brother David’s warning, that he would be made to do extra
chores instead of having his free hours if he didn’t start concentrating, made
him focus, and somehow, he finished the day.

As soon as he was outside, out of view of the monastery building, he ran. It
was spring, and he couldn’t help but feel happy: he loved the cherry trees,

with their froth of pink blossoms, and the tulips, their glossed, improbable
colors, and the new grass, soft and tender beneath him. Sometimes, when he
was alone, he would take the Navajo doll and a twig he had found that was
shaped like a person outside and sit on the grass and play with them. He made
up voices for them both, whispering to himself, because Brother Michael had
said that boys didn’t play with dolls, and that he was getting too old to play,
anyway.

He wondered if Brother Luke was watching him run. One Wednesday,
Brother Luke had said, “I saw you running up here today,” and as he was
opening his mouth to apologize, the brother had continued, “Boy, what a great
runner you are! You’re so fast!” and he had been literally speechless, until the
brother, laughing, told him he should close his mouth.

When he stepped inside the greenhouse, there was no one there. “Hello?”
he called out. “Brother Luke?”

“In here,” he heard, and he turned toward the little room that was appended
to the greenhouse, the one stocked with the supplies of fertilizer and bottles of
ionized water and a hanging rack of clippers and shears and gardening
scissors and the floor stacked with bags of mulch. He liked this room, with its
woodsy, mossy smell, and he went toward it eagerly and knocked.

When he walked in, he was at first disoriented. The room was dark and
still, but for a small flame that Brother Luke was bent over on the floor.
“Come closer,” said the brother, and he did.

“Closer,” the brother said, and laughed. “Jude, it’s okay.”

So he went closer, and the brother held something up and said “Surprise!”
and he saw it was a muffin, a muffin with a lit wooden match thrust into its
center.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s your birthday, right?” asked the brother. “And this is your birthday
cake. Go on, make a wish; blow out the candle.”

“It’s for me?” he asked, as the flame guttered.

“Yes, it’s for you,” said the brother. “Hurry, make a wish.”

He had never had a birthday cake before, but he had read about them and
he knew what to do. He shut his eyes and wished, and then opened them and
blew out the match, and the room went completely dark.

“Congratulations,” Luke said, and turned on the light. He handed him the
muffin, and when he tried to offer the brother some of it, Luke shook his
head: “It’s yours.” He ate the muffin, which had little blueberries and which

he thought was the best thing he had ever tasted, so sweet and cakey, and the
brother watched him and smiled.

“And I have something else for you,” said Luke, and reached behind him,
and handed him a package, a large flat box wrapped in newspaper and tied
with string. “Go on, open it,” Luke said, and he did, removing the newspaper
carefully so it could be reused. The box was plain faded cardboard, and when
he opened it, he found it contained an assortment of round pieces of wood.
Each piece was notched on both ends, and Brother Luke showed him how the
pieces could be slotted within one another to build boxes, and then how he
could lay twigs across the top to make a sort of roof. Many years later, when
he was in college, he would see a box of these logs in the window of a toy
store, and would realize that his gift had been missing parts: a red-peaked
triangular structure to build a roof, and the flat green planks that lay across it.
But in the moment, it had left him mute with joy, until he had remembered his
manners and thanked the brother again and again.

“You’re welcome,” said Luke. “After all, you don’t turn eight every day, do
you?”

“No,” he admitted, smiling wildly at the gift, and for the rest of his free
period, he had built houses and boxes with the pieces while Brother Luke
watched him, sometimes reaching over to tuck his hair behind his ears.

He spent every minute he could with the brother in the greenhouse. With
Luke, he was a different person. To the other brothers, he was a burden, a
collection of problems and deficiencies, and every day brought a new
detailing of what was wrong with him: he was too dreamy, too emotional, too
energetic, too fanciful, too curious, too impatient, too skinny, too playful. He
should be more grateful, more graceful, more controlled, more respectful,
more patient, more dexterous, more disciplined, more reverent. But to Brother
Luke, he was smart, he was quick, he was clever, he was lively. Brother Luke
never told him he asked too many questions, or told him that there were
certain things he would have to wait to know until he grew up. The first time
Brother Luke tickled him, he had gasped and then laughed, uncontrollably,
and Brother Luke had laughed with him, the two of them tussling on the floor
beneath the orchids. “You have such a lovely laugh,” Brother Luke said, and
“What a great smile you have, Jude,” and “What a joyful person you are,”
until it was as if the greenhouse was someplace bewitched, somewhere that
transformed him into the boy Brother Luke saw, someone funny and bright,
someone people wanted to be around, someone better and different than he
actually was.

When things were bad with the other brothers, he imagined himself in the
greenhouse, playing with his things or talking to Brother Luke, and repeated

back to himself the things Brother Luke said to him. Sometimes things were
so bad he wasn’t able to go to dinner, but the next day, he would always find
something in his room that Brother Luke had left him: a flower, or a red leaf,
or a particularly bulbous acorn, which he had begun collecting and storing
under the grate.

The other brothers had noticed he was spending all his time with Brother
Luke and, he sensed, disapproved. “Be careful around Luke,” warned Brother
Pavel of all people, Brother Pavel who hit him and yelled at him. “He’s not
who you think he is.” But he ignored him. They were none of them who they
said they were.

One day he went to the greenhouse late. It had been a very hard week; he
had been beaten very badly; it hurt him to walk. He had been visited by both
Father Gabriel and Brother Matthew the previous evening, and every muscle
hurt. It was a Friday; Brother Michael had unexpectedly released him early
that day, and he had thought he might go play with his logs. As he always did
after those sessions, he wanted to be alone—he wanted to sit in that warm
space with his toys and pretend he was far away.

No one was in the greenhouse when he arrived, and he lifted the grate and
took out his Indian doll and the box of logs, but even as he was playing with
them, he found himself crying. He was trying to cry less—it always made him
feel worse, and the brothers hated it and punished him for it—but he couldn’t
help himself. He had at least learned to cry silently, and so he did, although
the problem with crying silently was that it hurt, and it took all your
concentration, and eventually he had to put his toys down. He stayed until the
first bell rang, and then put his things away and ran back downhill toward the
kitchen, where he would peel carrots and potatoes and chop celery for the
night’s meal.

And then, for reasons he was never able to determine, not even when he
was an adult, things suddenly became very bad. The beatings got worse, the
sessions got worse, the lectures got worse. He wasn’t sure what he had done;
to himself, he seemed the same as he always had. But it was as if the brothers’
collective patience with him were reaching some sort of end. Even Brothers
David and Peter, who loaned him books, as many as he wanted, seemed less
inclined to speak to him. “Go away, Jude,” said Brother David, when he came
to talk to him about a book of Greek myths the brother had given him. “I
don’t want to look at you now.”

Increasingly he was becoming convinced that they were going to get rid of
him, and he was terrified, because the monastery was the only home he had
ever had. How would he survive, what would he do, in the outside world,
which the brothers had told him was full of dangers and temptations? He

could work, he knew that; he knew how to garden, and how to cook, and how
to clean: maybe he could get a job doing one of those things. Maybe someone
else might take him in. If that happened, he reassured himself, he would be
better. He wouldn’t make any of the mistakes he had made with the brothers.

“Do you know how much it costs to take care of you?” Brother Michael
had asked him one day. “I don’t think we ever thought we’d have you around
for this long.” He hadn’t known what to say to either of those statements, and
so had sat staring dumbly at the desk. “You should apologize,” Brother
Michael told him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Now he was so tired that he didn’t have strength even to go to the
greenhouse. Now after his classes he went down to a corner of the cellar,
where Brother Pavel had told him there were rats but Brother Matthew said
there weren’t, and climbed onto one of the wire storage units where boxes of
oil and pasta and sacks of flour were stored, and rested, waiting until the bell
rang and he had to go back upstairs. At dinners, he avoided Brother Luke, and
when the brother smiled at him, he turned away. He knew for certain now that
he wasn’t the boy Brother Luke thought he was—joyful? funny?—and he was
ashamed of himself, of how he had deceived Luke, somehow.

He had been avoiding Luke for a little more than a week when one day he
went down to his hiding place and saw the brother there, waiting for him. He
looked for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere, and instead he began to
cry, turning his face to the wall and apologizing as he did.

“Jude, it’s all right,” said Brother Luke, and stood near him, patting him on
the back. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” The brother sat on the cellar steps.
“Come here, come sit next to me,” he said, but he shook his head, too
embarrassed to do so. “Then at least sit down,” said Luke, and he did, leaning
against the wall. Luke stood, then, and began looking through the boxes on
one of the high shelves, until he retrieved something from one and held it out
to him: a glass bottle of apple juice.

“I can’t,” he said, instantly. He wasn’t supposed to be in the cellar at all: he
entered it through the small window on the side and then climbed down the
wire shelves. Brother Pavel was in charge of the stores and counted them
every week; if something was missing, he’d be blamed. He always was.

“Don’t worry, Jude,” said the brother. “I’ll replace it. Go on—take it,” and
finally, after some coaxing, he did. The juice was sweet as syrup, and he was
torn between sipping it, to make it last, and gulping it, in case the brother
changed his mind and it was taken from him.

After he had finished, they sat in silence, and then the brother said, in a low
voice, “Jude—what they do to you: it’s not right. They shouldn’t be doing that
to you; they shouldn’t be hurting you,” and he almost started crying again. “I
would never hurt you, Jude, you know that, don’t you?” and he was able to
look at Luke, at his long, kind, worried face, with his short gray beard and his
glasses that made his eyes look even larger, and nod.

“I know, Brother Luke,” he said.

Brother Luke was quiet for a long time before he spoke next. “Do you
know, Jude, that before I came here, to the monastery, I had a son? You
remind me so much of him. I loved him so much. But he died, and then I
came here.”

He didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t have to say anything, it seemed,
because Brother Luke kept talking.

“I look at you sometimes, and I think: you don’t deserve to have these
things happen to you. You deserve to be with someone else, someone—” And
then Brother Luke stopped again, because he had begun to cry again. “Jude,”
he said, surprised.

“Don’t,” he sobbed, “please, Brother Luke—don’t let them send me away;
I’ll be better, I promise, I promise. Don’t let them send me away.”

“Jude,” said the brother, and sat down next to him, pulling him into his
body. “No one’s sending you away. I promise; no one’s going to send you
away.” Finally he was able to calm himself again, and the two of them sat
silent for a long time. “All I meant to say was that you deserve to be with
someone who loves you. Like me. If you were with me, I’d never hurt you.
We’d have such a wonderful time.”

“What would we do?” he asked, finally.

“Well,” said Luke, slowly, “we could go camping. Have you ever been
camping?”

He hadn’t, of course, and Luke told him about it: the tent, the fire, the smell
and snap of burning pine, the marshmallows impaled on sticks, the owls’
hoots.

The next day he returned to the greenhouse, and over the following weeks
and months, Luke would tell him about all the things they might do together,
on their own: they would go to the beach, and to the city, and to a fair. He
would have pizza, and hamburgers, and corn on the cob, and ice cream. He
would learn how to play baseball, and how to fish, and they would live in a
little cabin, just the two of them, like father and son, and all morning long

they would read, and all afternoon they would play. They would have a
garden where they would grow all their vegetables, and flowers, too, and yes,
maybe they’d have a greenhouse someday as well. They would do everything
together, go everywhere together, and they would be like best friends, only
better.

He was intoxicated by Luke’s stories, and when things were awful, he
thought of them: the garden where they’d grow pumpkins and squash, the
creek that ran behind the house where they’d catch perch, the cabin—a larger
version of the ones he built with his logs—where Luke promised him he
would have a real bed, and where even on the coldest of nights, they would
always be warm, and where they could bake muffins every week.

One afternoon—it was early January, and so cold that they had to wrap all
the greenhouse plants in burlap despite the heaters—they had been working in
silence. He could always tell when Luke wanted to talk about their house and
when he didn’t, and he knew that today was one of his quiet days, when the
brother seemed elsewhere. Brother Luke was never unkind when he was in
these moods, only quiet, but the kind of quiet he knew to avoid. But he
yearned for one of Luke’s stories; he needed it. It had been such an awful day,
the kind of day in which he had wanted to die, and he wanted to hear Luke
tell him about their cabin, and about all the things they would do there when
they were alone. In their cabin, there would be no Brother Matthew or Father
Gabriel or Brother Peter. No one would shout at him or hurt him. It would be
like living all the time in the greenhouse, an enchantment without end.

He was reminding himself not to speak when Brother Luke spoke to him.
“Jude,” he said, “I’m very sad today.”

“Why, Brother Luke?”

“Well,” said Brother Luke, and paused. “You know how much I care for
you, right? But lately I’ve been feeling that you don’t care for me.”

This was terrible to hear, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. “That’s not
true!” he told the brother.

But Brother Luke shook his head. “I keep talking to you about our house in
the forest,” he said, “but I don’t get the feeling that you really want to go
there. To you, they’re just stories, like fairy tales.”

He shook his head. “No, Brother Luke. They’re real to me, too.” He wished
he could tell Brother Luke just how real they were, just how much he needed
them, how much they had helped him. Brother Luke looked so upset, but
finally he was able to convince him that he wanted that life, too, that he
wanted to live with Brother Luke and no one else, that he would do whatever

he needed to in order to have it. And finally, finally, the brother had smiled,
and crouched and hugged him, moving his arms up and down his back.
“Thank you, Jude, thank you,” he said, and he, so happy to have made
Brother Luke so happy, thanked him back.

And then Brother Luke looked at him, suddenly serious. He had been
thinking about it a lot, he said, and he thought it was time for them to build
their cabin; it was time that they go away together. But he, Luke, wouldn’t do
it alone: Was Jude going to come with him? Did he give him his word? Did he
want to be with Brother Luke the way Brother Luke wanted to be with him,
just the two of them in their small and perfect world? And of course he did—
of course he did.

So there was a plan. They would leave in two months, before Easter; he
would celebrate his ninth birthday in their cabin. Brother Luke would take
care of everything—all he needed to do was be a good boy, and study hard,
and not cause any problems. And, most important, say nothing. If they found
out what they were doing, Brother Luke said, then he would be sent away,
away from the monastery, to make his way on his own, and Brother Luke
wouldn’t be able to help him then. He promised.

The next two months were terrible and wonderful at the same time. Terrible
because they passed so slowly. Wonderful because he had a secret, one that
made his life better, because it meant his life in the monastery had an end.
Every day he woke up eager, because it meant he was one day closer to being
with Brother Luke. Every time one of the brothers was with him, he would
remember that soon he would be far away from them, and it would be a little
less bad. Every time he was beaten or yelled at, he would imagine himself in
the cabin, and it would give him the fortitude—a word Brother Luke had
taught him—to withstand it.

He had begged Brother Luke to let him help with the preparations, and
Brother Luke had told him to gather a sample of every flower and leaf from
all the different kinds of plants on the monastery grounds. And so in the
afternoons he prowled the property with his Bible, pressing leaves and petals
between its pages. He spent less time in the greenhouse, but whenever he saw
Luke, the brother would give him one of his somber winks, and he would
smile to himself, their secret something warm and delicious.

The night finally arrived, and he was nervous. Brother Matthew was with
him in the early evening, right after dinner, but eventually he left, and he was
alone. And then there was Brother Luke, holding his finger pressed to his lips,
and he nodded. He helped Luke load his books and underwear into the paper
bag he held open, and then they were tiptoeing down the hallway, and down
the stairs, and then through the darkened building and into the night.

“There’s just a short walk to the car,” Luke whispered to him, and then,
when he stopped, “Jude, what’s wrong?”

“My bag,” he said, “my bag from the greenhouse.”

And then Luke smiled his kind smile, and put his hand on his head. “I put it
in the car already,” he said, and he smiled back, so grateful to Luke for
remembering.

The air was cold, but he hardly noticed. On and on they walked, down the
monastery’s long graveled driveway, and past the wooden gates, and up the
hill that led to the main road, and then down the main road itself, the night so
silent it hummed. As they walked, Brother Luke pointed out different
constellations and he named them, he got them all right, and Luke murmured
in admiration and stroked the back of his head. “You’re so smart,” he said.
“I’m so glad I picked you, Jude.”

Now they were on the road, which he had only been on a few times in his
life—to go to the doctor, or to the dentist—although now it was empty, and
little animals, muskrats and possums, gamboled before them. Then they were
at the car, a long maroon station wagon piebald with rust, its backseat filled
with boxes and black trash bags and some of Luke’s favorite plants—the
Cattleya schilleriana, with its ugly speckled petals; the Hylocereus undatus,
with its sleepy drooping head of a blossom—in their dark-green plastic nests.

It was strange to see Brother Luke in a car, stranger than being in the car
itself. But stranger than that was the feeling he had, that everything had been
worth it, that all his miseries were going to end, that he was going to a life
that would be as good as, perhaps better than, anything he had read about in
books.

“Are you ready to go?” Brother Luke whispered to him, and grinned.

“I am,” he whispered back. And Brother Luke turned the key in the
ignition.

There were two ways of forgetting. For many years, he had envisioned
(unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the
images and sequences and words that he didn’t want to think about again and
open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly
and tightly. But this method wasn’t effective: the memories seeped out
anyway. The important thing, he came to realize, was to eliminate them, not
just to store them.

So he had invented some solutions. For small memories—little slights,
insults—you relived them again and again until they were neutralized, until

they became near meaningless with repetition, or until you could believe that
they were something that had happened to someone else and you had just
heard about it. For larger memories, you held the scene in your head like a
film strip, and then you began to erase it, frame by frame. Neither method was
easy: you couldn’t stop in the middle of your erasing and examine what you
were looking at, for example; you couldn’t start scrolling through parts of it
and hope you wouldn’t get ensnared in the details of what had happened,
because you of course would. You had to work at it every night, until it was
completely gone.

Though they never disappeared completely, of course. But they were at
least more distant—they weren’t things that followed you, wraithlike, tugging
at you for attention, jumping in front of you when you ignored them,
demanding so much of your time and effort that it became impossible to think
of anything else. In fallow periods—the moments before you fell asleep; the
minutes before you were landing after an overnight flight, when you weren’t
awake enough to do work and weren’t tired enough to sleep—they would
reassert themselves, and so it was best to imagine, then, a screen of white,
huge and light-lit and still, and hold it in your mind like a shield.

In the weeks following the beating, he worked on forgetting Caleb. Before
going to bed, he went to the door of his apartment and, feeling foolish, tried
forcing his old set of keys into the locks to assure himself that they didn’t fit,
that he really was once again safe. He set, and reset, the alarm system he’d
had installed, which was so sensitive that even passing shadows triggered a
flurry of beeps. And then he lay awake, his eyes open in the dark room,
concentrating on forgetting. But it was so difficult—there were so many
memories from those months that stabbed him that he was overwhelmed. He
heard Caleb’s voice saying things to him, he saw the expression on Caleb’s
face as he had stared at his unclothed body, he felt the horrid blank airlessness
of his fall down the staircase, and he crunched himself into a knot and put his
hands over his ears and closed his eyes. Finally he would get up and go to his
office at the other end of the apartment and work. He had a big case coming
up, and he was grateful for it; his days were so occupied that he had little time
to think of anything else. For a while he was hardly going home at all, just
two hours to sleep and an hour to shower and change, until one evening he’d
had an episode at work, a bad one, the first time he ever had. The night janitor
had found him on the floor, and had called the building’s security department,
who had called the firm’s chairman, a man named Peterson Tremain, who had
called Lucien, who was the only one he had told what to do in case something
like this should happen: Lucien had called Andy, and then both he and the
chairman had come into the office and waited with him for Andy to arrive. He
had seen them, seen their feet, and even as he had gasped and writhed on the

ground, he had tried to find the energy to beg them to leave, to reassure them
that he was fine, that he just needed to be left alone. But they hadn’t left, and
Lucien had wiped the vomit from his mouth, tenderly, and then sat on the
floor near his head and held his hand and he had been so embarrassed he had
almost cried. Later, he had told them again and again that it was nothing, that
this happened all the time, but they had made him take the rest of the week
off, and the following Monday, Lucien had told him that they were making
him go home at a reasonable hour: midnight on the weekdays, nine p.m. on
the weekends.

“Lucien,” he’d said, frustrated, “this is ridiculous. I’m not a child.”

“Believe me, Jude,” Lucien had said. “I told the rest of the management
committee I thought we should ride you like you were an Arabian at the
Preakness, but for some strange reason, they’re worried about your health.
Also, the case. For some reason, they think if you get sick, we won’t win the
case.” He had fought and fought with Lucien, but it hadn’t made a difference:
at midnight, his office lights abruptly clicked off, and he had at last resigned
himself to going home when he had been told.

Since the Caleb incident, he had barely been able to talk to Harold; even
seeing him was a kind of torture. This made Harold and Julia’s visits—which
were increasingly frequent—challenging. He was mortified that Harold had
seen him like that: when he thought of it, Harold seeing his bloody pants,
Harold asking him about his childhood (How obvious was he? Could people
actually tell by talking to him what had happened to him so many years ago?
And if so, how could he better conceal it?), he was so sharply nauseated that
he had to stop what he was doing and wait for the moment to pass. He could
feel Harold trying to treat him the same as he had, but something had shifted.
No longer did Harold harass him about Rosen Pritchard; no longer did he ask
him what it was like to abet corporate malfeasance. And he certainly never
mentioned the possibility that he might settle down with someone. Now his
questions were about how he felt: How was he? How was he feeling? How
were his legs? Had he been tiring himself out? Had he been using the chair a
lot? Did he need help with anything? He always answered the exact same
way: fine, fine, fine; no, no, no.

And then there was Andy, who had abruptly reinitiated his nightly phone
calls. Now he called at one a.m. every night, and during their appointments—
which Andy had increased to every other week—he was un-Andyish, quiet
and polite, which made him anxious. He examined his legs, he counted his
cuts, he asked all the questions he always did, he checked his reflexes. And
every time he got home, when he was emptying his pockets of change, he
found that Andy had slipped in a card for a doctor, a psychologist named Sam

Loehmann, and on it had written FIRST VISIT’S ON ME. There was always
one of these cards, each time with a different note: DO IT FOR ME, JUDE, or
ONE TIME. THAT’S IT. They were like annoying fortune cookies, and he
always threw them away. He was touched by the gesture but also weary of it,
of its pointlessness; it was the same feeling he had whenever he had to replace
the bag under the sink after Harold’s visits. He’d go to the corner of his closet
where he kept a box filled with hundreds of alcohol wipes and bandages,
stacks and stacks of gauze, and dozens of packets of razors, and make a new
bag, and tape it back in its proper place. People had always decided how his
body would be used, and although he knew that Harold and Andy were trying
to help him, the childish, obdurate part of him resisted: he would decide. He
had such little control of his body anyway—how could they begrudge him
this?

He told himself he was fine, that he had recovered, that he had regained his
equilibrium, but really, he knew something was wrong, that he had been
changed, that he was slipping. Willem was home, and even though he hadn’t
been there to witness what had happened, even though he didn’t know about
Caleb, about his humiliation—he had made certain of this, telling Harold and
Julia and Andy that he’d never speak to them again if they said anything to
anyone—he was still somehow ashamed to be seen by him. “Jude, I’m so
sorry,” Willem had said when he had returned and seen his cast. “Are you
sure you’re okay?” But the cast was nothing, the cast was the least shameful
part, and for a minute, he had been tempted to tell Willem the truth, to
collapse against him the way he never had and start crying, to confess
everything to Willem and ask him to make him feel better, to tell him that he
still loved him in spite of who he was. But he didn’t, of course. He had
already written Willem a long e-mail full of elaborate lies detailing his car
accident, and the first night they were reunited, they had stayed up so late
talking about everything but that e-mail that Willem had slept over, the two of
them falling asleep on the living-room sofa.

But he kept his life moving along. He got up, he went to work. He
simultaneously craved company, so he wouldn’t think of Caleb, and dreaded
it, because Caleb had reminded him how inhuman he was, how deficient, how
disgusting, and he was too embarrassed to be around other people, normal
people. He thought of his days the way he thought of taking steps when he
was experiencing the pain and numbness in his feet: he would get through
one, and then the next, and then the next, and eventually things would get
better. Eventually he would learn how to fold those months into his life and
accept them and keep going. He always had.

The court case came, and he won. It was a huge win, Lucien kept telling

him, and he knew it was, but mostly he felt panic: Now what was he going to
do? He had a new client, a bank, but the work there was of the long, tedious,
fact-gathering sort, not the kind of frantic work that required twenty-hour
days. He would be at home, by himself, with nothing but the Caleb incident to
occupy his mind. Tremain congratulated him, and he knew he should be
happy, but when he asked the chairman for more work, Tremain had laughed.
“No, St. Francis,” he said. “You’re going on vacation. That’s an order.”

He didn’t go on vacation. He promised first Lucien, and then Tremain, he
would, but that he couldn’t at the moment. But it was as he had feared: he
would be at home, making himself dinner, or at a movie with Willem, and
suddenly a scene from his months with Caleb would appear. And then there
would be a scene from the home, and a scene from his years with Brother
Luke, and then a scene from his months with Dr. Traylor, and then a scene
from the injury, the headlights’ white glare, his head jerking to the side. And
then his mind would fill with images, banshees demanding his attention,
snatching and tearing at him with their long, needley fingers. Caleb had
unleashed something within him, and he was unable to coax the beasts back
into their dungeon—he was made aware of how much time he actually spent
controlling his memories, how much concentration it took, how fragile his
command over them had been all along.

“Are you all right?” Willem asked him one night. They had seen a play,
which he had barely registered, and then had gone out to dinner, where he had
half listened to Willem, hoping he was making the correct responses as he
moved his food around his plate and tried to act normal.

“Yes,” he said.

Things were getting worse; he knew it and didn’t know how to make it
better. It was eight months after the incident, and every day he thought about
it more, not less. He felt sometimes as if his months with Caleb were a pack
of hyenas, and every day they chased him, and every day he spent all his
energy running from them, trying to escape being devoured by their snapping,
foaming jaws. All the things that had helped in the past—the concentrating;
the cutting—weren’t helping now. He cut himself more and more, but the
memories wouldn’t disappear. Every morning he swam, and every night he
swam again, for miles, until he had energy enough only to shower and climb
into bed. As he swam, he chanted to himself: he conjugated Latin verbs, he
recited proofs, he quoted back to himself decisions that he had studied in law
school. His mind was his, he told himself. He would control this; he wouldn’t
be controlled.

“I have an idea,” Willem said at the end of another meal in which he had
failed to say much of anything. He had responded a second or two too late to

everything Willem had said, and after a while, they were both quiet. “We
should take a vacation together. We should go on that trip to Morocco we
were supposed to take two years ago. We can do it as soon as I get back. What
do you think, Jude? It’ll be fall, then—it’ll be beautiful.” It was late June:
nine months after the incident. Willem was leaving again at the beginning of
August for a shoot in Sri Lanka; he wouldn’t be back until the beginning of
October.

As Willem spoke, he was thinking of how Caleb had called him deformed,
and only Willem’s silence had reminded him it was his turn to respond. “Sure,
Willem,” he said. “That sounds great.”

The restaurant was in the Flatiron District, and after they paid, they walked
for a while, neither of them saying anything, when suddenly, he saw Caleb
coming toward them, and in his panic, he grabbed Willem and yanked him
into the doorway of a building, startling them both with his strength and
swiftness.

“Jude,” Willem said, alarmed, “what are you doing?”

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered to Willem. “Just stay here and don’t
turn around,” and Willem did, facing the door with him.

He counted the seconds until he was certain Caleb must have passed, and
then looked cautiously out toward the sidewalk and saw that it hadn’t been
Caleb at all, just another tall, dark-haired man, but not Caleb, and he had
exhaled, feeling defeated and stupid and relieved all at once. He noticed then
that he still had Willem’s shirt bunched in his hand, and he released it.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Willem.”

“Jude, what happened?” Willem asked, trying to look him in the eyes.
“What was that?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just thought I saw someone I didn’t want to see.”

“Who?”

“No one. This lawyer on a case I’m working on. He’s a prick; I hate dealing
with him.”

Willem looked at him. “No,” he said, at last. “It wasn’t another lawyer. It
was someone else, someone you’re scared of.” There was a pause. Willem
looked down the street, and then back at him. “You’re frightened,” he said,
his voice wondering. “Who was it, Jude?”

He shook his head, trying to think of a lie he could tell Willem. He was
always lying to Willem: big lies, small lies. Their entire relationship was a lie
—Willem thought he was one person, and really, he wasn’t. Only Caleb knew

the truth. Only Caleb knew what he was.

“I told you,” he said, at last. “This other lawyer.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.” Two women walked by them, and as they passed, he heard
one of them whisper excitedly to the other, “That was Willem Ragnarsson!”
He closed his eyes.

“Listen,” Willem said, quietly, “what’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m tired. I need to go home.”

“Fine,” Willem said. He hailed a cab, and helped him in, and then got in
himself. “Greene and Broome,” he said to the driver.

In the cab, his hands began to shake. This had been happening more and
more, and he didn’t know how to stop it. It had started when he was a child,
but it had happened only in extreme circumstances—when he was trying not
to cry, or when he was in extraordinary pain but knew that he couldn’t make a
sound. But now it happened at strange moments: only cutting helped, but
sometimes the shaking was so severe that he had difficulty controlling the
razor. He crossed his arms against himself and hoped Willem wouldn’t notice.

At the front door, he tried to get rid of Willem, but Willem wouldn’t leave.
“I want to be alone,” he told him.

“I understand,” Willem said. “We’ll be alone together.” They had stood
there, facing each other, until he had finally turned to the door, but he couldn’t
fit the key into the lock because he was shaking so badly, and Willem took the
keys from him and opened the door.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Willem asked as soon as they were
in the apartment.

“Nothing,” he said, “nothing,” and now his teeth were chattering, which
was something that had never accompanied the shaking when he was young
but now happened almost every time.

Willem stepped close to him, but he turned his face away. “Something
happened while I was away,” Willem said, tentatively. “I don’t know what it
is, but something happened. Something’s wrong. You’ve been acting
strangely ever since I got home from The Odyssey. I don’t know why.” He
stopped, and put his hands on his shoulders. “Tell me, Jude,” he said. “Tell me
what it is. Tell me and we’ll figure out how to make it better.”

“No,” he whispered. “I can’t, Willem, I can’t.” There was a long silence. “I
want to go to bed,” he said, and Willem released him, and he went to the

bathroom.

When he came out, Willem was wearing one of his T-shirts, and was lofting
the duvet from the guest room over the sofa in his bedroom, the sofa under
the painting of Willem in the makeup chair. “What’re you doing?” he asked.

“I’m staying here tonight,” Willem said.

He sighed, but Willem started talking before he could. “You have three
choices, Jude,” he said. “One, I call Andy and tell him I think there’s
something really going wrong with you and I take you up to his office for an
evaluation. Two, I call Harold, who freaks out and calls Andy. Or three, you
let me stay here and monitor you because you won’t talk to me, you won’t
fucking tell me anything, and you never seem to understand that you at least
owe your friends the opportunity to try to help you—you at least owe me
that.” His voice cracked. “So what’s it going to be?”

Oh Willem, he thought. You don’t know how badly I want to tell you. “I’m
sorry, Willem,” he said, instead.

“Fine, you’re sorry,” said Willem. “Go to bed. Do you still have extra
toothbrushes in the same place?”

“Yes,” he said.

The next night he came home late from work, and found Willem lying on
the sofa in his room again, reading. “How was your day?” he asked, not
lowering his book.

“Fine,” he said. He waited to see if Willem was going to explain himself,
but he didn’t, and eventually he went to the bathroom. In the closet, he passed
Willem’s duffel bag, which was unzipped and filled with enough clothes that
it was clear he was going to stay for a while.

He felt pathetic admitting it to himself, but having Willem there—not just
in his apartment, but in his room—helped. They didn’t speak much, but his
very presence steadied and refocused him. He thought less of Caleb; he
thought less of everything. It was as if the necessity of proving himself
normal to Willem really did make him more normal. Just being around
someone he knew would never harm him, not ever, was soothing, and he was
able to quiet his mind, and sleep. As grateful as he was, though, he was also
disgusted at himself, by how dependent he was, how weak. Was there no end
to his needs? How many people had helped him over the years, and why had
they? Why had he let them? A better friend would have told Willem to go
home, told him he would be fine on his own. But he didn’t do this. He let
Willem spend the few remaining weeks he had in New York sleeping on his
sofa like a dog.